Meta releases the full 405 billion parameter Llama 3.1 model with open weights.
Meta published complete model weights for Llama 3.1 405B under a permissive license that allows commercial use. Users can download the checkpoint and run inference on a single 8xH100 node or via quantized versions on consumer hardware.
Developers learn that frontier-scale performance no longer requires paying per-token API fees or signing restrictive terms. Organizations can now host models internally to retain data sovereignty and eliminate recurring inference costs.
Meta AI released the 405B checkpoint on July 23, 2024, and within two weeks the Hugging Face community reported over 1.2 million downloads and fine-tunes achieving 82 percent on MMLU.
Step 1: Visit https://ai.meta.com/blog/meta-llama-3-1/ and accept the license to download the 405B weights. Step 2: Load the model with Hugging Face Transformers and the 4-bit quantization config from bitsandbytes. Step 3: Run a single forward pass on your local GPU to verify tokens-per-second and memory footprint.